9 replies to this topic

[williamk]

How do I use Acc to find the number of words in the English text of the NKJV (or any version) of a book in the Bible?

[Levi Durfey]

The way I did this for 1 Peter was to search (words, not verses) like this: * <AND> [RANGE 1 peter]
The number of hits will be your word count. But you can show details for more info.

[jpkang]

Enter in the search box:

* <AND> [RANGE nameOfBook]

For example,

In the NKJVS, if I enter

* <AND> [RANGE Ps]

I get 43142 hits (=words) in Psalms. You can also enter any appropriate reference to get a word count on a range of books, chapters, or verses.

Explanation:

* means any word

AND and RANGE can be inserted from the Search > Enter Command submenu.

In English Bibles, the number of hits is the same as the number of words.

[David Lang]

Rather than doing this one book at a time, you could also leave out the RANGE command and simply do a word search for the asterisk. Then choose Table Bar Chart from the Details pop-up (the button that looks like a bar graph). In the Table Bar Chart window, select Total Hits from the pop-up menu. This will give you a bar chart listing every book and the number of words they contain.

[williamk]

Thanks to Levi, JP, and David for this help -- just what I needed.

[williamk]

David,

Using your method, as well as the "range" method suggested by Levi and JP . . .

If I get to the Table Bar Chart and choose from the pop up in the lower right hand corner . . .

Total Words = 3,467 for Ephesians
Total Hits = 3,020 for Ephesians

Why the discrepancy? When searching using the asterisk, what is the difference between a hit and a word?

Thanks,

WK

[David Lang]

Ah, I wondered if anyone would catch that. As it turns out, the numbers in the Total Words count are inflated by things like punctuation. Using Total Hits is therefore more accurate in this case. It gives an exact count of the number of words because you searched for every word using the asterisk. I hope this helps.

[williamk]

Thanks David -- perhaps that's explained in the Acc Help files (which I didn't search). If not, an explanation of that discrepancy might be worth adding using your explanation.

So is it safe to assume that using "Hits" gives the exact number of words in a book as opposed to just a better number than "Words." If I counted the words in Ephesians in the NKJV one by one would I get 3,020? (Not trying to be picky -- just wondered how accurate "Hits" is in terms of the exact number of words?)

Thanks for your help on this.

[David Lang]

Yes, hits gives an accurate count.

[Helen Brown]

True in Greek, but in Hebrew the suffix has no lemma so you get a different number of Hits of you search for * (all lemmas) or "*" (all inflected forms). Of course, traditionalists would prefer to count whole words including prefixes and suffixes as one word, but that just isn't possible. The invisible morphological separators are indispensable for accurate searching, and Accordance cannot just ignore them.